Mactel Part XVXXX

The transition will begin next year, and it ought to be a pretty smooth one. From the very beginning, Mac OS X and XCode (Apple’s official software development system) were designed to be CPU-independent. So a functional Intel-compatible edition of Mac OS X 10.4 has already been completed — and any app that was written with XCode, using the guidelines Apple has recommended from Day One, can be recompiled for Intel CPUs with just minor modifications.

Microsoft and Adobe, which are to software what the USA and the Soviet Union once were to geopolitics, have already announced their full and immediate support of the move, which means that all of the other developers will simply have to play along.

One pro user wrote to me today saying that his G5 was having troubles, so he was considering buying a new one to replace it. My response to him was, essentially, "That’s a great idea. Later on you’ll be able to sell it to a museum. The placard will read, ‘Last Mac ever purchased.’"

That’s a bit of an overstatement, of course. But who, really, is going to be buying new Macintosh computers when they know flat-out that it’s a dead-end purchase? People spending their own money? Corporate buyers? Not likely. We all know our computers are going to be obsolete one day, just as we all know we’re going to die one day. But most of us, thankfully, don’t know the specific date. Now, as far as our computers go, we do.

I tend to side with Dave Nagel in this discussion. If Apple sticks with their two year time frame, they are in deep trouble. People like myself, who are loyal Apple fans, will question purchasing anything from Apple for the next two years. Nuendo, which our boys run on a PC, will not be moved to a G5 as planned. We will be upgrading that Windows box with a new AMD based mother board and will live with the wondrous world of XP and eventually Longhorn. We may pick up a good used G5 to run FCP on – but I doubt I will be doing an Apple Store hardware purchase until the Intel platform is alive and well – if at all.